Apple’s App Store revenue hit a new record in 2021. How long can Apple continue to “win without doing anything”?

Apple said on Monday that it now has 745 million paid subscribers, including services such as Apple Music and iCloud, as well as users who subscribe to apps through the App Store. That number was 700 million last summer.

In addition, Apple paid $60 billion to developers in 2021, accounting for 70% to 85% of Apple's App Store's total revenue, while the App Store received 15% to 30% of sales from digital transactions of applications.

A total of $260 billion has been paid to developers since the App Store launched in 2008.

In 2019, Apple said it had paid developers $155 billion since 2008. By the end of 2020, that figure had reached $200 billion, an increase of $45 billion from 2019. The latest data disclosed by Apple on Monday showed that the figure increased by $60 billion in 2021.

From the App Store’s historical data, we can see that App Store’s sales will continue to grow rapidly, which is another shot in the arm for the capital market.

This part of the statistics shows the development momentum of its service business, because investors and analysts want to see that Apple not only makes money from selling hardware, but also sells services and applications to customers, such as application downloads.

It is worth mentioning that assuming that the fees Apple pays to developers are equivalent to 30% of the total sales of Apple App Store, we can roughly estimate the total revenue of Apple App Store.

According to CNBC's analysis, if Apple's commission is uniformly 30%, the total revenue of the Apple App Store in 2020 will exceed 64 billion US dollars. Then the highest sales of the App Store in 2021 will be 85.71 billion US dollars. If Apple's commission is 15%, the corresponding sales will be 70.58 billion US dollars.

But Apple has changed its commission structure several times over the past year to address regulatory and legal challenges. After all, its App Store business model, which takes a commission from in-store digital goods purchases, has become a target of proposed legislation in the United States and Europe.

Apple also launched a "Small Business Program" in 2021, which cuts 15% of fees for developers with annual revenue of less than $1 million. It is estimated that as many as 98% of App Store developers fall into this category, but this only accounts for a small portion of total sales.

Apple also launched a news app that will cut developers' fees to 15% if they provide content to Apple News in August. For all developers, Apple will also only charge 15% of the second year's subscription fee instead of 30%.

In addition, Apple also announced the following upcoming features:

1. Later this year, iPhone and Apple Watch users in states across the U.S. will be able to add their driver’s license or state ID to the Wallet app.
2. Apple is continuing its push into classical music. Last year, Apple Music acquired Primephonic, a classical music streaming service, and later this year, Apple plans to launch a standalone Apple Music classical music app.
3. 3D Apple Maps will be available in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver later this year.

Although Apple has become the world's first company with a market value of over $3 trillion, no company is absolutely safe, no matter how big it is. It has been criticized for "living off its past successes" and lacking innovation. In addition to setting new highs in market value and sales, Apple needs to come up with something more convincing in the face of the new market environment.

This article is reproduced from Leiphone.com. If you need to reprint it, please go to Leiphone.com official website to apply for authorization.